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I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

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Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#41

Post by joshvm »

limedaring wrote: post #2

Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.

Firstly congrats - as a recent HN submissions showed, half the battle is simply finishing the damn thing.

A couple of questions, if you don't mind.

How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time?

Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters?

I've been toying with the idea of writing a book on programming AVR microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#42

Post by peterarmstrong »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #39
peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming…

That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#44

Post by jtwebman »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #42
dmlorenzetti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming…

That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)

It is nice to see people from the tools we use daily watch Hacker News and actually listen to what we talk about. Thank you and I will be using you guys for my first book on Functional Programming soon!

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#45

Post by darkmarmot »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

Also working on a LeanPub book that doubles as framework documentation for our company until complete. Love it so much! Thank you!!!

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#46

Post by darkmarmot »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #39
peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming…

I second this. Also you seem to have more erotic/unusual titles...

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#47

Post by arikrak »

Very informative post! I just finished creating an online course on Ruby on Rails and I'm thinking of creating an ebook from it.

I'm also looking for authors who would want to publish their programming books or posts on my site [1], where they could include programming challenges and other exercises.

[1] https://www.learneroo.com.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#48

Post by bemmu »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

I've been using Leanpub to write my first ebook doing the "1000 words a day" thing for 2 weeks now. I thought I would see if I've learned enough from running Candy Japan to do a book on subscription boxes.

It's been a really pleasant experience so far, although my chosen topic feels a bit broad, as it encompasses everything from running a website to marketing, shipping, packaging, curation, customer service etc. and it feels difficult to really get too deep into any subject. And the reality is that running such a box by yourself is exactly about being a generalist in all of this stuff.

At this point I have about 60 pages written and am now commissioning a book cover on 99designs: https://en.99designs.jp/book-cover-design/contests/create-e-...

I'm plotting a way to A/B test these covers. Maybe do an ad campaign with 1/6 of traffic getting each cover and see how many email signups each one gets. My leanpub page is looking rather bare now without one: https://leanpub.com/subscription-box

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#50

Post by soapdog »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

Just want to say that I have two books on Leanpub totalling about 12.000 readers and am extremelly happy with the platform! Big thank you to the Leapub team, you folks rock!
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